Samsung predicts mobile gaming performance will surpass PS4 by 2020

Reaching out for the support of game developers, Samsung said today that it is constantly developing new game technologies for its smartphones, and it expects mobile performance to surpass that of the PlayStation 4 game console by 2020.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone already surpasses the graphics performance of the Xbox 360 video game console, said Samsung’s Jonas Gustavsson, speaking at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco. The talk was part of Samsung’s pitch to recruit game developers to its mobile game and virtual reality platforms.

Samsung is particularly excited about VR’s potential. The latest estimates from global market research firm TrendForce show the virtual reality market will grow from under $7 billion today to $70 billion in 2020. In the next 10 years, 135 million VR headsets will be sold in America alone. That’s one for every 3 people.

“We designed the S7 for gaming,” he said, noting it had 30 percent faster central processing and 60 percent better graphics processing than the Galaxy S6.

Above: Niklas Smedberg of Epic Games demos Vulkan on Samsung device.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

We’ll be talking about these game-related advances and more at our GamesBeat Summit event next week at the Cavallo Point resort in Sausalito, California, with Samsung’s vice president Mihai Pohontu.

Niklas Smedberg, technical director for platform partnerships for Epic Games, showed off a demo of a Samsung device running the new Vulkan graphics applications programming interface that enables games to take advantage of graphics hardware.

Samsung is also doing other things to court game developers, such as creating the game launcher and game tools. These tools enable gamers to control how they play games, with features such as “play” and “pause,” to minimize on-screen notifications, and to record videos of gameplay.

“We’re moving to broadcast games live at some point,” Gustavsson said.

Samsung also created its GalaxyGameDev program to attract more developers to its platform, including the Samsung app store that is present across hundreds of millions of its devices.

Andrew Dickerson of Samsung also noted the South Korean electronics giant’s efforts in virtual reality, which include the Samsung Gear VR mobile VR headset launched last fall, as well as the Gear 360 VR camera that goes on sale on April 29.

Above: Samsung’s user interface will help games take off better.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi